17 iPhone Screenshot Tips and Tricks

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips and tricks for taking screenshots on your iPhone. 

So capturing a screenshot on your iPhone is pretty straight forward. On most modern iPhones there's a side button  and you just hold the side button and the volume button and you get the screenshot. It shows at the lower left hand corner and if you wait a few seconds that disappears and the screenshot is now saved in your Photos App. But there is a lot more functionality there. 

For instance if you were to take the screenshot and then tap on the floating thumbnail at the bottom you now come to a screen where you would have lots of different controls. If instead of saving this to the Photos App and want to do something else with it just hit the Share button at the upper right hand corner. Now you have the ability to share it various different ways. For instance you can send it via messages or mail to someone or you could save it to a note. There's a lot more you can do if you scroll up and to the right in this list of icons. In fact you can tap the more button here and you can customize which apps are shown here. Tap Edit and you can add items to the Favorites list and then reorder them so the one used the most is the furthest to the left. Likewise if you scroll down this list you'll see Edit actions here and you can add other actions mostly things you create in the Shortcuts app to this list.  

There's another way to Share that allows you to skip the thumbnail and editing interface. If you take the screenshot and instead of just tap on the floating thumbnail you tap and hold for two seconds and then release it goes directly to the Share sheet. So you skip that entire thing. You can still get back to all the controls by tapping x and it goes back to a floating thumbnail. A quick tap there brings you into the full interface. 

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Now there are other ways to take screenshots as well. For instance you can go into settings here and then go into Accessibility and then look for Touch. At the bottom of the list of Touch options is Back Tap. Go into that and you've got a Double Tap and Triple Tap. So let's turn the Double Tap, Back Tap, into a way to take Screenshots. I could just select it from the list here. So now to take a Screenshot I just tap lightly with one finger on the back of my iPhone and it will take the screenshot. If you go back up to the top of the touch controls here and you go to Assistive Touch, if you turn this On then you get this dot on your screen. I'm going to turn off my mouse here and you'll be able to see it. There it is at the bottom right. If I tap that it opens a menu and you can see there while I've got it set to Single Tap, Open Menu. But I can change that to simply take a screenshot. So I have basically a screenshot button and now when I tap that, and you can see it there at the bottom right, it will take the screenshot like that. Notice it doesn't include the button there in the screenshot. Note you can also set it to a double tap or a long press on that button. If you have a single tap, open menu, then you have a menu that looks like this. You can actually change what each of these buttons do. So I can change the upper right hand button there to he a screenshot for instance. In that case it will take two taps to actually get the screenshot done but I also have all these other buttons I can setup.

There's another way to take a screenshot using Siri. Just ask Siri to do it. Siri take a screenshot. 

Now one of the problems I mentioned with taking a screenshot is the is saves to your Photos Library. Which may not be where you want it. After all I just want my photos in my Photos Library. I don't want to save screenshots there. So you have some options. One of those is to tap the Share button here and then use Copy and this will copy the screenshot to the Clipboard. It takes you back to the interface here. But with the screenshot now in the Clipboard I can just tap the Trash icon there and then delete the screenshot. Now I can go into another app, like Mail here, and I can just paste and it will paste the screenshot in. If you'd rather save the screenshot as a file you can do that as well. So tap the Share button here and then scroll down and one of the options you'll see here is Save to File, the file path. So you go in there and then you have your whole file path interface for navigating to where you want to save something. So, for instance, here in my Documents folder I have created a Screenshots Folder for holding these screenshots. I can go in here and Save it here and then when I'm done with that I can use Trash and Delete Screenshot.

There's another way to copy to clipboard or save as a file. That's to simply tap the Done button. Notice that you then get several options here. The first is Save to Photos as would have been done automatically without even going into this interface. You can also Save to Files. You can save to a Note and you can simply Copy & Delete or just Delete the screenshot without doing anything with it. So I can use Copy & Delete and now it's quickly gone away and I've got it ready to paste into another app. 

But there is yet another way to share a screenshot with an app or too ave it to Files. Take the screenshot but instead of tapping or tapping and holding for a few seconds tap and drag. Notice you can drag the screenshot around. Let's say I want to add it to a Note. With another finger I can tap on Notes and then I can go into a note and I can drop it here or I could have gone into the Files app, I can actually just move over the Files App and you see how it opens automatically and now I can drop it here into Files and not bother with that entire interface at all and just goes into the Files App at this location and doesn't give you the interface. I don't have to take extra steps to dismiss it or delete the screenshot so it doesn't save to photos. 

So far I've just talked about actually saving the screenshot as is. There's a lot you can do while you're in this interface before you save the screenshot. Notice that this box around it has these handles on the sides, top and bottom, and the corners. You can use this to crop the screenshot so you don't save the entire screen. You can just save a portion of it. Even after you've cropped you can drag up or down or left or right to add more or back to what you want to save. Notice you can also use two fingers here and pinch in or out to crop that way. Another thing that you do with a screenshot is instead of deal with it as an image you can Copy text from it. This little button here at the bottom right, tap that and it will find any text that it can in the image. So even if you couldn't select text in something, like in some app and the text wasn't selectable, you can use a screenshot. In the screenshot you can use this text tool and you can now mark up your document. 

Now of course you can markup your screenshots before you do anything with them as well. So if I take a screenshot here and I go into the regular screenshot interface it's this tool here allows me to now to hold the pen. I can tap the Plus Button and add shapes and text and stickers and all sorts of things to this screenshot before I then do other things with it. A special feature of screenshots in Safari is this interface here at the top where it shows Screen and Full Page. If I select Full Page now I get a screenshot of the entire page, not just the portion that was visible on the screen. So now if I save it I get this really long jpeg. But I can also choose the Copy tool here and crop only to a certain section of the page, like that. 

If you want to get a screenshot of something that is hard to grab because there's an animation or something going on. The one way to do it is use screen recordings instead and grab a screenshot from that. So I'm going to use Control Center here at the top right and start a screen recording. Like say when the icons are wiggling or something like that. I'm going to tap here to stop that screen recording, like that. It is going to save into Photos. So I'll go into Photos now and then I'll pause it and get to the frame I want, like say right here, and now if I just do a light tap in the middle notice all the interface stuff goes away and I get to do an additional screenshot, like this. Now I've got a screenshot of something that would have been hard to grab otherwise. 

Let's say I take a series of screenshots and bind them together in a PDF. You can do that. I'll assume that you saved the screenshots to several files to the File App. So I've got three here. So in the Files App I can tap on the three dots button and select and I'll select these 3 screenshots, like that. Then I'm going to go to Share and you may not see anyway to save this as a PDF. But if you go to Print it will show you the three items here and that it is going to print three pages. Instead take two fingers and pinch out here. But there is also a Share button here. If I share this it is going to save a PDF and the PDF file will have those three screenshots imbedded in it. One of the disappointing things about screenshots is how many steps it takes. Sometimes it would be nice just to take a screenshot and have it saved as a file in one step. Well, you actually can do that. The trick is to use a shortcut. In the Shortcuts App I've created a shortcut called Shortcut to File. If I go to that all it is if I take a screenshot action and the Saved File action right after it and it is immediately going to link the screenshot as to what to save. Here for the location I actually selected this it originally went to Shortcuts, the folder in iCloud Drive. But instead I changed it to go to the same screenshots folder we were looking at before. Under Options here I turned Off, Ask Where to Save, although you can certainly leave that on and then save each screenshot individually. But instead I set a subpath that is the Current Date Variable. I set it to a custom date format, you can see it here below. So year dash month dash day and then hours minutes seconds with no dividers between them. Now that I have a shortcut that will instantly save a screenshot with no options, or action, or anything, I can assign that to something. For instance back in Accessibility under Touch I can assign that shortcut to a double tap back tap. So here I can choose from the list at the bottom from Shortcuts here that Screenshots to File like that. Now a quick back tap will take the screenshot and save it to the Files App, right here. You can see it added it there. If you have an iPhone 16 or the iPhone 15 Pro with the Action Button. You can assign the shortcut to the Action Button and then have a button simply take the screenshot and instantly save it as well. Of course you can create your own shortcuts to do various different things. For instance just coping to the Clipboard instead of saving to a file. There's a lot you can do with a screenshot shortcut.

Hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.